Catholic Church Abortion-Shames New Yorkers, But of Course They're Missing the Point

Step one: Baring valid threat to the mother's health, THE LINE for disallowing abortions should not be conception, it should be when the fetus starts feeling pain. Avoiding pain and suffering and pursuing pleasure and happiness is the basis of the entire programming placed in us all by God. Such is our ENTIRE pursuit. Step two: Making poor people richer; eliminating the "no husband" disgrace; and making effective birth control more allowable, accessible, and advisable, are the three major factors in preventing abortions. Ignoring these relevant factors makes a person one of the real killers! Fact three: Most all people who advocate the "sanctity of life" are liars deep down, or all would also be vegetarians. Plus, most all pro-life people would quickly become pro-choice if their daughter came home pregnant after being raped, especially if it was by a black man. Such are only against abortions for another artificial salvation cop-out, trying to fool God that they are strong golden rule people, which Jesus said one has to be in Matt. 25:31-46. So, lack of (true) ethics and lack of realistic intelligence are both key problems concerning optimizing the abortion issue.

The Goldenrule Name

Frankly, I believe YOU are missing the point here, as both sides so often do in this debate.

The pro-life camp assumes that fetuses are lives like yours and mine. With this assumption in hand, abortion becomes murder, and it is possible to argue that murder is sufficiently wrong that it trumps otherwise-important matters such as gender equality and parental quality-of-life. GIVEN THE ORIGINAL ASSUMPTION, many folks (pro-choice included) would probably agree with this conclusion; thus a relevant counter-argument must grapple with the (much philosophically thornier) issue of whether fetuses are really "people" and can therefore be murdered.

Simply talking past this point, as though pro-lifers are unaware of the gender-equity problems wrapped up with it, is to ignore the real crux of the two camps' disagreement. In your defense, pro-lifers are often just as unwilling to acknowledge that the pro-choice camp is not generally pro-baby-murder! They are simply operating under a different set of assumptions.

In short, complaining that the Church "misses the point" is itself a pretty ignorant statement. Don't make this misunderstanding worse than it is.

No the point was that in spite of teaching sex ed in school and having free condoms everywhere, which is what we were told would make people responsible human beings when it came to sex, there are still tens of thousands of people in the city who choose to ignore all that and act like unprotected rabbits anyway. And you are mistaken by singling out the Catholic church, since leaders of Protestant and Jewish faiths are also up in arms over the stats.

I have to wonder, because I haven't seen this stated anywhere, whether this figure is "number of abortions performed in New York City" or "number of abortions performed on New York City residents." There could be a vast difference; in much of the country, abortion providers are very hard to find. It's not at all unusual for women from those huge rural areas to travel to big cities for the procedure. If that's the case here, the religiously-hyped 41 percent figure could be very misleading.